It could be a video of Tom Hanks selling dental insurance, Elon Musk pushing a phoney get rich quick scheme, or Bear Grylls shilling cryptocurrency. None of these videos are real. But they can look convincing. This is the new face of online scams. The latest weapon in the arsenal of scammers is artificial intelligence generated ‘deepfakes’: videos in which a subject’s face or body has been digitally altered to make them look like someone else. When deployed by scammers, deepfakes are usually designed to imitate celebrities – like Hanks, Musk and Grylls – to try and dupe audiences into fake investment schemes. Deepfakes are just one of the ways that artificial intelligence, or AI, is upping scam sophistication. “AI has the ability to take what was already a concerning topic – scams – and make it seem more real and legitimate to people,” says Brendan Goode, Commonwealth Bank’s Chief Security Officer.
How AI is upping scam sophistication
